<strong>How long has the 1 GHZ Power4 been available? A year? I'm sure if Apple had expressed serious interest IBM could have spent some of the past year upping the MHZ while lowering the wattage. I imagine even without Apple's interest that's what they've done.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Change of tense required, I'm afraid. The Power4 will be available shortly, IBM haved demoed machines with it in, but they are not yet for sale. AFAIK there are no plans to sell it to third parties.
[quote]Originally posted by gopher:
<strong>
However, you think to yourself, the Power4 is way too much CPU to put in a desktop Mac. But IBM could prolly yank out some bleeding-edge tech (the multi-core die, the aluminum "carrier" that allows multiple Power4 dies to be mounted together, etc.) and insert the AltiVec units I need to get acceptable GUI performance for OS X.
If you were SJ, might you not give IBM a ring to see if they would be interested? Apple gets what it needs (good low power CPUs where it needs them and cutting edge performance where it needs it), Motorola gets to concentrate on the embedded processor market and IBM gets to increase its sales of PowerPC chips and perhaps get some additional server sales.
I'm not saying any of this is within the realm of likelihood, only that it isn't as far-fetched as some of you make it out to be.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It just isn't that simple to remove bits from a processor like this. The power4 has been designed with bandwidth in mind, over the top cache architectures, immensely wide busses, and fast interconnects. Adding an Altivec unit (even if Motorola licensed it to them) would require a lot of design work. Also, note that the Power4 does not have a high clock frequency compared to x86 chips (1.3GHz on a .13micron SOI process, AMD hope to double that.)
However, Apple putting MacOSX server onto IBM machines is a different matter.
Comments
<strong>
You could, literally, boil an egg on one of those.
iHotplate?
<strong>How long has the 1 GHZ Power4 been available? A year? I'm sure if Apple had expressed serious interest IBM could have spent some of the past year upping the MHZ while lowering the wattage. I imagine even without Apple's interest that's what they've done.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Change of tense required, I'm afraid. The Power4 will be available shortly, IBM haved demoed machines with it in, but they are not yet for sale. AFAIK there are no plans to sell it to third parties.
[quote]Originally posted by gopher:
<strong>
However, you think to yourself, the Power4 is way too much CPU to put in a desktop Mac. But IBM could prolly yank out some bleeding-edge tech (the multi-core die, the aluminum "carrier" that allows multiple Power4 dies to be mounted together, etc.) and insert the AltiVec units I need to get acceptable GUI performance for OS X.
If you were SJ, might you not give IBM a ring to see if they would be interested? Apple gets what it needs (good low power CPUs where it needs them and cutting edge performance where it needs it), Motorola gets to concentrate on the embedded processor market and IBM gets to increase its sales of PowerPC chips and perhaps get some additional server sales.
I'm not saying any of this is within the realm of likelihood, only that it isn't as far-fetched as some of you make it out to be.</strong><hr></blockquote>
It just isn't that simple to remove bits from a processor like this. The power4 has been designed with bandwidth in mind, over the top cache architectures, immensely wide busses, and fast interconnects. Adding an Altivec unit (even if Motorola licensed it to them) would require a lot of design work. Also, note that the Power4 does not have a high clock frequency compared to x86 chips (1.3GHz on a .13micron SOI process, AMD hope to double that.)
However, Apple putting MacOSX server onto IBM machines is a different matter.
Michael